Because I am a grown-up, with a vivid sense of self-worth, a look, a gym membership I actually use and a solid skin-care regime, I don’t go in for a great deal of icon-gazing, role-model-aspiring or comparative flaw-in-self-finding.
Admittedly, I had a brief flirtation with Nigella Lawson wannabe-ism some 18 months back, but then the TV series happened, all those late-adopter Lawson aspirers got in on the act and it all began feeling too mainstream. And so, generally, I tend to get on with life without wishing I was a bit less like me and considerably more like some other public figure.
There is, however, one weak spot in my otherwise unflawed armour of self-satisfaction. One quasi-fictional work that fills me with longing for a better me, a me with a glossier, sparklier, more groomed life. It is Sex and the City. I currently find myself floundering in the early stages of acute Carrie Bradshaw envy.
Let’s get one thing straight. The truly desirable elements of the Sex and the City existence have nothing to do with the feckless, perversion-lite couplings that one or more of the principal protagonists will indulge in during the course of each episode. Most of us realise by now that the show’s occupation with sex is actually little more than a device upon which programme-makers might display the other, truly sexy Sex and the City moments. Because Sex and the City is not about sex. Not really.
It’s about lifestyle. About being perpetually on the verge of taking a spring break in the Hamptons, about endless Cosmopolitan-fuelled charity launches, about the obscene amounts of quality free-time single, New York women appear to be at liberty to navigate their way through, the bottomless bank accounts that finance their every designer move – and the fabulous, fabulous outfits. Most especially the outfits.
Yet while attempting to deconstruct the charm of the Sex and the City experience, I have discovered, frustratingly, that I will never be able to recreate it. Apparently the four constituent lifestyle parts – Brunch, Thinness, Money and Wardrobe – could not co-exist with any of the others in real life. In short, the whole Sex and the City lifestyle seethes with contradictions.
Allow me to explain. Issue one concerns what I have come to regard as the true pornography of the programme – the lurid brunching interludes. Our four heroines – each of whom, it should be pointed out, represents one of the four archetypal kinds of woman: redhead, peroxide, glossy brunette and curly – brunch in a manner that can only adequately be described as wanton, gratuitous, promiscuous.
Brunch is such a decadent concept anyway – accommodating, as it does, late nights, lie-ins, hangovers (one of which is so severe it makes Charlotte’s hair hurt) and complex, extravagantly fat-laden egg dishes and necessitating, as it does, an entire, separate brunching wardrobe (but more of that later) – that to brunch as artfully and frequently as these women do is to practically abandon yourself to sin. Given that each episode involves an average of two brunches and that each series incorporates a maximum of two references to the gainful employment of the characters involved (not counting Carrie’s laptop moments), I am left wondering when exactly these women find the time to fit work round their brunching activities?
The brunch business leads us neatly on to issue two: the admirable yet unexplained thinness of all female characters portrayed in the programme. To a Sex and the City-ite, thinness is clearly a way of life.
Yet it also clashes somewhat violently with exhaustive, eggs Benedict-filled brunching and, more significantly, with utterly gym-free days.
These people take cabs everywhere and, when they aren’t brunching, indulge heavily in canapés and sugary cocktails. I can only presume that the cigarettes they chain-smoke and the complicated coffee they consume, combined with the on-going angst they suffer, makes them so jittery their muscle system has a constantly spasming, organic Slender Tone effect on their flesh.
Issue three concerns the financial resources of Carrie, Charlotte, Samantha and Miranda. As we have already seen, theirs is a high-
maintenance, high-cost lifestyle. It is huge midtown apartments and weekly hairdressing bills, hot- and cold-running Jimmy Choos and never-be-seen-in-the-same-outfit-twice. And yet, as we have also seen, our ladies do not appear to do an awful lot to fund their perpetual excess. Give or take the occasional reference to Samantha’s PR agency, and the regular shot of Carrie, rumpled up in her duvet, tapping maniacally at her laptop (which is actually, we all know, an excuse to show that this woman can do lounge-about-the-house-casual as effortlessly as she does high glam), Sex and the City accommodates very few “at work” sequences.
No one ever discusses work, or has to bail out of a glamorous evening engagement because of work, or is depressed because of work, or even vaguely considers not indulging in Cosmopolitans during a week night, because it might make the following day at the office somewhat uncomfortable. And that’s without even acknowledging that their leisure activities (featuring brunch, breakdowns and serial dating) add up to a full-time occupation in their own right. I can only presume Carrie et al must be quietly dipping into considerable trust funds. How else do they keep themselves in such phenomenal outfits?
And so we arrive at issue four – wardrobes. It was, in fact, the clothes that hooked me into this fruitless quest to get the lifestyle originally. Such clothes! Quirky vintage mixed with stealth-wealth designer, strapless bandeau tops as everyday wear, devastating coats and chi chi accessories … Manhattan sex kitten meets maiden aunt. Eccentric Soho artist does uptown power dressing … And clothes that work around the lives.
Clothes for brunching. Endless dating clothes. Clothes that allow you to sweat over a deadline on the weekly (apparently obscenely well-paid) sex column, yet still look chic. Clothes that express their individual sexual ethos. (In one eisode, Carrie, who is dating a politician, begins wearing vintage Halston as a nod to the Jackie O aesthetic). Frankly, if I had such clothes, I wouldn’t dream of having sex with anyone ever again, for fear of mussing them up.
Finding myself in Manhattan recently, I swung by Hotel Venus, a curious little boutique in the basement of a shop on West Broadway, which is owned by Patricia Field, stylist extraordinaire and sartorial consultant on the show. I thought maybe I could unearth the source of “the look” there.
Hotel Venus is a ridiculous combination of hysteric glamour trash and Hello Kitty! paraphernalia, genuine 1980s dead stock and low-key fetish gear. All of which works together in the most inexplicable ways. More surreally, Hotel Venus is manned entirely by beautiful, understated drag queens, who spend a lot of their time using the shop’s product ranges to redo each otherÃ-s make-up, and curiously upbeat goths, one of whom introduced himself as Die J! Mars and explained that he spends his evenings DJing. “I spin a sort of dark trance techno,” he added. “It’s called Haunted House.” All of this against a backdrop of Take That’s greatest hits.
It was, I thought, more Madonna in Desperately Seeking Susan than Carrie in The Mercer Kitchen, but it was an oddly addictive environment – like a flea market without the grubby bits – and every so often I got hints of the Sex and the City sartorial ethos. In a pair of sloppy, fall-down pointy heel boots (shopping-with-Charlotte-wear), in a one-shoulder, customised-yet-cosy sweatshirt (typing in winter), in a slightly punk ball gown (for luring Mr Big).
I left with a kitsch Vegas silver charm bracelet. It’s Carrie on a camp day, I thought. And, on reflection, it’s probably the closest I am going to get to owning the Sex and th City lifestyle. Give or take the sporadic brunch.
Sex and the City is screened on SABC3 on Wednesdays at 10pm